Tomorrow's episode is Pinkie Apple Pie! Could Pinkie Pie and her family be kin to the Apple clan? One thing's for sure, there's going to be a song about it.
Speaking of which, so far the idea that these numbers represent the episodes with songs this season has held up. Episode 5 gave us Hearts Strong As Horses, ep. 7 gave us Stop The Bats, and ep. 8 last week gave us Generosity.
Soilers for future episodes we know about:

Quote:

Ep. 11 is going to be a Twilight with Cadence episode*EDIT*Now with 100% more Discord, and 12 is going to be the Weird Al guest appearance. 14 is titled "Filli Vanilli," so a song there totally makes sense.

I'm still really underenthused about Season 4 in general. I'm sort of vaguely looking forward to the Weird Al episode, but that's about it.

I hold what I've seen so far in really low esteem. It's still better than G3 was, but at this point there are several kid's shows that I've barely even glanced at that are ranking higher than MLP according to whatever fuzzy processes my brain judges quality by.

I'm not alone on this.

While the new season has brought a bit of an activity spike, presumably in people looking for links to stream episodes and such, Equestria Daily peaked in 2012 -- a bit strange to me, since that was when I was least involved, and I was fairly apathetic about the middle ~third of season 2, but there it is. Maybe people are moving to other fansites. Maybe FiMFiction (which holds steady during the inter-season intervals and represents an audience that hasn't been juggled around like with the imageboards) would be a better indicator of deep involvement.
Oh. While FiMFiction is only in slight decline, Season 4 has brought it no such spike in activity, and even its more prominent and highly involved users are starting to get ready to jump ship.

What made FiM great? Was it Lauren Faust? Perhaps not. I feel like it's gotten much worse now that she's gone, but Lauren Faust has been completely out of it since season 2. Certainly, Faust isn't everything. We have the brain-meats and animation-grinding and music-scoring and voice-acting of a lot of other people to thank, and season 3 had some great moments without her.

Maybe it's just getting old. Or maybe it will still get better.
Maybe it really is just me, and the disillusionment springs from within.

Maybe this is all we have to look forward to:

It used to be when people talked about such futile displays as boycotting Hasbro it was in protest of the poor quality of their mass produced figures in comparison with the lovingly-crafted fanmade ones. Now? Less so.

Quote:

...Hasbro is ignoring the brony demographic by being careless about characters, continuity, and logic, approving (or demanding) material that assumes their audience is too dumb to care about anything except pretty princess wings.

I wouldn't say that's focusing on the 6-year-old demographic. 6-year-olds are smarter than that. It sounds more like focusing on the deviantart demographic. But I've assumed that Hasbro knows what it's doing. It would be a shame if the show deteriorated into just another...

I've said this before, but my expectations for the show have never been all that high. In the beginning, I was in it for the PMVs. Then I drifted into the fanarts, and then the fanmusics and remixes, and later the fimfictions. Sometimes I was just laughing (or cringing) at the particularly over-the-top bronies. Other times, I was right there with them. The great thing was, my expectations might have been low (oh, who am I kidding I devoured season 1), but the show usually surpassed them by leaps and bounds(there's my enthusiasm trying to speak up again). But now they're even lower(maybe I'm just trying to trick myself into being pleasantly surprised), and it's like the show isn't even trying to change that anymore.
Kind of sad.

Wait what was I talking about PONY PONY PONY PONY
agh my brain's contradicting itself again
I don't know how I feel
about anything
past or future

At least I know tomorrow's --er, today's-- song is going to be decent when I watch it sometime next week._________________butts

Last edited by Heretical Rants on Mon Jan 20, 2014 3:38 am; edited 1 time in total

Today's episode featured a name and speaking (OR YELLING!) part for the musclebound jock pony, AND A PROMINENT APPEARANCE BY DERPY!

so adorbs

Also more speaking appearances by Spitfire, Soarin, and now Fleetfoot!

Plus, we get our second glimpse of mysterious rainbow-shining objects when RD learns a lesson for the shared diary, just like Rarity's rainbow thread from two weeks ago.
It's pretty clear by now what they're building up to. Everypony is going to become Rainbow Dash and make the show 20-hundred percent cooler.

Fleeting appearances from characters that you like don't make the episode suck any less.

Whatever story there was to tell in this episode, FiM already told it ages ago, most of it in a matter of seconds in the series pilot, but some of it in Sweet and Elite or the Academy episode, and those older episodes told that story better.

The only character development we got on the main cast was that RD still ultimately makes the same decision when the stakes are substantially lowered and the path is more gradual. At least, that if you assume that a test of loyalty was what the episode tried to get across, even though it absolutely failed at showing us that in a compelling way. Has she ever gone to such extreme measures to avoid making a decision until the last minute before, though? I don't really remember nor care anymore.

The only thing that could even be considered interesting about this episode is it seems to be setting up Rainbow's eventual disenchantment with the Wonderbolts, which I don't think is where anyone wanted this to go. Never meet your heroes, I guess.

We already know that there are better fliers in Ponyville than Snowflake. Both Fluttershy and Snowflake already understand that they don't really belong in a flying race. If the writers had picked better fliers (we already know of some other Ponyville residents that would fit the bill), this could have been less about Ponyville's skin-of-the-teeth qualification and more about loyalty and finding out that your heroes are just bags of dicks.

If (SPOILER) Saurin had actually been injured to the point of being out of the race, then there would have been no good reason for Rainbow to not just fly with the Cloudsdale team. Fluttershy doesn't care about being in the race. She's only there because Rainbow needs a flier for the relay. Snowflake is clearly dedicated more to bulking up. Why isn't he competing in that, instead? It's not that Ponyville's team is really really the underdog, here. It's that two of the members don't care about racing. In order for this to have been a compelling test of loyalty, they would have had to have been there for some reason other than providing cursory support for Rainbow.

I give the episode an F-- for being contrived redundant boring *&#@*@fibble)*#&withabottleofrum(#@*%##$@$*(@

Why am I even still watching this show? I should just stick to the fanfiction. It's usually more compelling._________________butts

Last edited by Heretical Rants on Mon Jan 20, 2014 5:18 am; edited 2 times in total

You're working on a lot of assumptions about A) how these fictional games operate and B) what goes on in between the episodes, so a lot of your issues really boil down to things you think up and don't like.
Fan speculation, while a fun pastime, it is vastly unlikely to either predict or apply to what the writers are actually doing and really shouldn't be used as a basis for criticizing the show.
I could spin up a few plausible explanations to address all that stuff up there, but ultimately what's the point? It would just be my extrapolations versus yours, and ultimately it wouldn't even matter because the whole Equestria Games thing is just a device to generate and focus a running arc throughout the season, like the Grand Galloping Gala in S1, and the minutia of how it's used (why RD, Fluttershy, and Biceps are the only ponies available for the relay race event) is simply unimportant to that goal. The point is, Dash is put in a situation where she has a very real chance to join her actual, non-illusory, lifelong heroes but doing so means leaving her adopted hometown and her friends out of the Equestria Games.

At this point the same thing might apply for the apparent recycling of earlier conflicts. Rarity gets her generosity tested in Manehattan (and actually kind of fails at it), Dash gets her loyalty tested with the relay race, but so far we don't have enough of the picture to bitch about it.
What if it's important that they're being tested against their elements yet again, in order to see if their experiences after so many adventures and whatnot have changed their affinities or skewed things out of perspective? What if giving up the Elements of Harmony severs their anchors to those aspects, and they have to rediscover it within themselves to unlock the McGuffin and save Equestria from an army of giant mantises with dubstep eyebeams? We can't really tell at this point.
This episode was clearly another part of the season's arc-length subplot, so it's probably a bad idea to pass judgment on that aspect when it hasn't even reached the halfway mark.

So if you're wondering how the Equestria Games proceed, and other pony facts just repeat to yourself, "Hey, it's just a show. I should really just relax."

response to the mysteriously-disappearing-post, hoy!
I deleted it because it didn't really add anything to what I originally posted about the episode. I could have copy-pasted two sentences from my original post and added ~5 words and it would have been about the same.

My main complaint with the episode was actually just that it bored me. Much of the rest of my post was just me trying to figure out why it bored me._________________butts

It feels like a bit of a betrayal when something that I like -- and the basis for a fandom that I'm actively involved in -- declines in quality like this, week after week, so I guess I am a bit annoyed, yeah. Mostly disappointed, but even though I acknowledge that they don't owe me anything, a bit annoyed.

I don't think these episodes are worth comparing to the ones leading up to the Gala, but we'll see.
Of course, the Equestria Games story arc has been going on since season 3, and I didn't have any complaints back then._________________butts

Last edited by Heretical Rants on Mon Jan 20, 2014 5:46 am; edited 1 time in total